In fairness, Mark, the cost to transition from a well-established

version to another well-established version is not that bad. For

instance from PHP 5.2 to PHP 5.5 or 5.6. By now, almost all of the

dependencies and packages and plugins will have updated versions. You

can still get into trouble and huge expense though with custom code. A

lot of people who built WordPress sites early had to build a lot of

custom code. Forcing them to spend thousands to rebuild is not exactly

fair. I’ve noticed more and more people in our community like to tell

others how to spend their money and how to run their website. That’s

why we wrote BusinessPress:

to let a publisher easily update his/her site at his/her own speed.

Anyway if WordPress as a community are going to force people to

update, forcing them to update to PHP 5.6 would be eminently more

reasonable than PHP 7. It’s a far easier upgrade and security upgrades

are planned until at

least 1 Januar 2019.